Status or tweet mining and analyzing?

[Oren Z]

Yes, it's being done continuously. Twitter, with it's standardized length constraint, was designed with exactly that purpose in mind. Collecting the data is the easy part. Analysis is the real business-end of the stick, and the CIA has made leaps forward since these articles were written in late 2011:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...el/247923/
and
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-cia-f...55316.html

Their progress has lead to this type of thing (articles published this year):

http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-prese...013-3?op=1
and
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenber...uggernaut/